Bronze and Iron: Old Latin Poetry from Its Beginnings to 100 B.C.

By Janet Lembke

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520333130

Janet Lembke

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BRONZE AND IRON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. LONDON, ENGLAND COPYRIGHT © 1973 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ISBN: 0-520-02164-9 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-182274 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA DESIGNED BY DAVE COMSTOCK

TO HANS

yes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Amicus certus in re incerta cemitur.

—Ennius, Tragoediae 216

Undoubted friends in a time of doubt are discovered, especially:

• Ada Bruce, Anna Blake, and Raymond White, teachers, whose love for English and the Classics was contagious;

• Felix Stefanile, poet, who first suggested that Old Latin could be made new again;

• D. S. Came-Ross, editor of Anon, and his colleagues, who believed in this project before I did;

• Ruth Adams, reference librarian, who persuaded broody librarians in three states that books kept in stacks don’t hatch;

• Anne D. Rosivach, who translated Alberto Grilli’s scholarly Italian into unclotted English and said she enjoyed the work;

• The National Translation Center, which granted me a fellowship that was transformed without difficulty into books and time;

• and the Camenae.

Thank you.

Gratia habetur utrisque, illisque tibique simitu.

—Lucilius, 1092

Permission from the following to quote copyrighted material is gratefully acknowledged:

Harper & Row, Publishers: lines from The Practical Sense from The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer, copyright © 1963 by Eric Hoffer.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: six-line excerpt from The Idea of Order at Key West from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

Richard Lewis: poem by Lynette Joass from Miracles: Poems by Children of the English-speaking World, collected by Richard Lewis, published by Simon and Schuster, copyright © 1966 by Richard Lewis.

The Macmillan Company: excerpts from The Mind of Primitive Man by Franz Boas, copyright 1938 by The Macmillan Company.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.: excerpts from Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood by Jean Piaget, translated by C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgson.

Charles Scribner’s Sons: excerpts from Feeling and Form by Suzanne K. Langer, copyright 1953 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

American Weave, vol. 31, no. 2 (December 1967): Waking intuitively…, after Q. Lutatius Catulus, and The Voice of Claudia. The latter appears in this MS in somewhat altered language and shape.

Arion: 6.3 (Autumn 1967): R, The Pioneers, Epitaph (Naevius), Tattoo, Ironstorm, Victory, and The Night Watch.

—: 7.2 (Summer 1968): The West, Portrait, Perhaps, of an Elder Poet, All That Glitters (in this MS called … On the Nature of My Art), and Hymn for Seedtime and a Safe Harvest.

—: 7.4 (Winter 1968): Waking intuitively…, Reveille, Possessions (in this MS called … A Georgie), Epitaph (Ennius), and Toward Translation of an Ancient and Unimportant Soundstatement by Valerius Aedituus.

Felix and Selma Stef anile: Clocks, after Aquilius, from Duo, poems by Janet Lembke and Morton Felix, Vagrom Chapbooks, Copyright October 1966, by Felix and Selma Stefanile. This plasma appears in this MS in very slightly different form.

SUMMARY OF

CONTENTS

SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

1 HISTORIA

2 MYTHOS

3 PLASMATA

SURVIVAL

CELEBRATIONS

POSSIBILITIES

COMMENTARY

SOURCES AND RESOURCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

1

HISTORIA

OLD LATIN POETRY looks, more than two thousand years later, like Humpty Dumpty after the irreversible accident. As a body of literature it is smashed; here lies decapitated epic, there a toothless fragment of archaic satire. Comedy has lost its fist, tragedy its power to mirror and purge. Only scattered, mostly unmatching shards are left, embedded in layers of later work. And though it’s been a matter of many theses—examining these meager verbifacts for clues to Latin’s evolution and Rome’s, all the world’s ologists and all the world’s ographers have not put Humpty together again.

The earliest remains represent a preprecious bronze age of Latin beginning no later than the eighth century B.C. and ending abruptly in the mid-third century B.C. It was not a literate age, much less a literary one. Some of the undatable verses left are as old as Rome, which legend founds in 743 B.C. These remnants of spoken traditions, popular and sacred, were first transcribed, sometimes without comprehension of meaning, centuries after they agglomerated in hut or grove. They include such minor curiosities as proverbs and prophecies, prayers and table graces, a charm to cure gout, and a set of abracadabras for healing a sprain. The names of the singers lie in the same limbo as those of the originators of Mother Goose. Some of the singsongs could well have been hatched by that good grey bird:

Hiberno pulvere, verno luto,

grandia farra, camille, metes.

—quoted by Macrobius, Saturnalia, V.20¹

Winter of dust, spring of mud— then reap, novice farmer, a good grain yield.

Lalla, lalla, lalla: i, aut dormi aut lacta.

—quoted by the scholiast on Persius, 3.18²

Lullay, lullay, lullay: either sleep, child, or suckle.

And here’s the gout charm, lines that might have been sung by an ancestor of the sorcerer’s apprentice. It apparently invokes some sort of gout spirit.

Ego tui memini, medere meis pedibus: terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto in meis pedibus.

—quoted by Varro, Rerum Rusticarum, I.ii.27

I call on you, now mend my big toe: may earth soak up my pain, here let good health remain in my big toe.

Such little verses share Latin poetry’s antique dark, in which there is life but not volitional art, with the crude thumping spring hymns of two priestly fraternities, the equinoxgreeting Salians and the Arvai Brothers whose job it was to pray for fertile soil and unblighted harvests. How old are the songs? As old as Rome’s legendary eighth-century founding?

Or older, composed perhaps during the settled seasons between the southward spilling treks of the Latin tribes down the Italian boot in the first millennium B.C.? One factual statement can be made. Some of the godnames in the hymns are abstractions for the sown earth and the stored harvest and thus show that these were the songs of an agricultural people rather than hunters or nomadic herdsmen.

The dark breaks suddenly. The iron age, the first formal age of Latin poetry, began with an amazing precision of date and author. The birthyear was 240 B.C.; the month, September; the occasion, the Roman Games made especially lavish in celebration of Rome’s victory over Carthage in the First Punic War. (Morning or afternoon? Was it sunny?) Delivery occurred in the form of two plays, a comedy and a tragedy, employing Greek plots and meters. Their author-translator was the Greek freedman Livius Andronicus (2847-204? B.C.), who also composed hymns and recast the Odyssey into Latin satumians for use as a teaching text. Saturnians were an Italic meter that, unlike Greek, was probably accentual rather than dependent on quantity and pitch. Livius’s hymns are lost; fewer than a hundred lines from his Odyssey and some of the plays survive. Succeeding Livius, steadily excelling him, are a host of poets known, if they are known today at all, as dim totemic figures, the almost mythic ancestors of the great tribes of Western poets and playwrights: Naevius, dramatist and epic poet; Plautus, comic playwright; Ennius, man of all forms, the first Roman to climb Helicon and rape the Muses and carry them home like Sabine women; Pacuvius, tragic playwright; Caecilius, writer of comedies; Terence, comic playwright of great eloquence and elegance; Lucilius, Ur-satirist; Lutatius Catulus and Porcius Licinus and Valerius Aedituus, epigrammatists all and critics in meter; Accius, tragic playwright; Lucretius, philosopher; and others, named and nameless, the makers of dramatic, erotic, and didactic verses. Many of their surviving poems look like uninspired wordcarvings fashioned at dawn’s light in imitation of Greek dreams. The shiny newness is quite gone now; lacunae riddle the lines like grubholes. The allusions ignite no modern associations and the events recalled have been made unreal by time’s passing. But the iron poems greatly influenced the syntax and spelling of classical Latin and were the first significant vehicles for the entry of Greek words into the Latin language (and from it into English). And the work of contemporary poets as different in manner as Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, and Louis Zukofsky trace iron contours at a single remove, that of translation from classical Latin. The iron age ended as abruptly as it began, on the eve of Catullus’s (84-54 B’c·) initial attempt at poem.

There are exceptions to the rule of fragment, bronze or iron. The durability of inscribed stone and metal has kept intact some short poems—dedications, epitaphs, the Arvai Hymn. Some of the comedies of Plautus (254-184 B.C.) and Terence (195-159? B.C.) have been handed down in reasonably uncorrupted manuscripts, as has the de Rerum Natura of Lucretius (987-55 B.C.). These, however, lie outside the urbs of present consideration partly because of their accessibility in translations and partly because playwriting and philosophy have become creative modes now largely separated from poetry. In the case of the plays, translations are not only printed but physical, on stage or screen; the 1963 musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was a sometimes very close adaptation of Plautine material. To apply, moreover, the plastic kind of translation I think mandatory in dealing with the fragments as poetry to either Lucretius or the comedies would be like setting Claude Levi- Strauss’s anthropological materials into hexameters or rewriting W. C. Fields’s dialogue in iambic senarii; it could—with dreadful effort—be done, but it’s not worth trying.

The most powerful iron poems are now mutilated beyond restoration to any semblance of original wholeness. The epic Annals of Ennius once consisted of eighteen books of hexameters; it is now a ruin of fewer than six hundred lines and phrases, less than half a book, perhaps a fortieth of the whole. Lucilius wrote thirty books of satires; fewer than thirteen hundred lines and scraps of lines are left. The satumian rubble of the earliest known national epic, The Song of the Punic War by Naevius, consists of only sixty-six probable excerpts. When a complete poem, usually short, or a passage of more than three consecutive lines survives, it seems a happy fluke, like finding a whole dinosaur egg in a literary Gobi.

How satisfying it would be to explain the survival of any Old Latin poetry by a law of natural literary selection. The initial loss of much iron poetry probably followed almost directly upon the last scratch of the poet’s stylus. Though poetry was written down, it was in essence a performing art to be chanted and danced or acted or simply recited. In those years without commercial publishers and libraries, demands for copies would be brought about by enormous and immediate success in the popular ear, as with Plautus’s comedies, or by schoolroom need. Even those works that passed popularity tests were subject to a stern and prudish government censorship. Unacceptable works were suppressed; there was small chance then for them to sleep for a hundred years and wake at the kiss of a discovery that they were neglected classics. But for some of the lucky passages that escaped this kind of annihilation, a principle of fitness does seem to be at work. In spite of the inherent fragility of ancient book materials and the equally inherent frailties of men—copyists will make mistakes, scholiasts embrace one-upmanship—some passages have been time-selected for their once and always poetry as worthy of continued life. Some of the best, however, have certainly been done in by uncontrollable natural forces—fire and flood and ordinary processes of decay. And some by human forces just as uncontrollable—barbarians destroying whatever did not glitter, crusaders rampant, Christians rejecting dirty stories, critics. Many lines reflect as the operative reason for present existence nothing more than taste, either the fancy of an individual or the groupthink of a generation. Some reveal the persistence not of intrinsic excellence but of the type of conservative pedagogy that today demands memorization of Trees and sets it up as a model poem: If it was good enough for your grandfather, it’s good enough for you. Others owe preservation to similarly apoetic criteria: an elevated moral tone or sideshow peculiarities of language.

Cicero (106-43 B-c·) exemplifies the man concerned with moral tone. His letters and orations are meaty with quotations illustrating what he found eloquent in diction and admirable for sentiment. Luckily he was a gourmet. Here is a prose approximation of the words of Ulysses on his deathbed, from Pacu- vius’s tragedy Niptra:

It is decent only to complain of bad luck, not lament it; this is man’s duty. Tears are the genius of a woman.

—Tusculanae Disputationes, II.21.50³

More often the lines have been fossilized in the useful but poetically meaningless works of the gourmandizers—the grammarians, the antiquaries, the archaizers. Though their volumes are unwitting Hesperiae of iron poetry, their motives for compilation had little to do with art and aesthetics. Instead, from the first century B.C. on, these writers nibbled at the poems with the